Congratulations Crunchi...

This year’s fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream , check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, winner of “Biggest Social Impact”. His poise and dedication helped keep the microblogging service online so it could aid revolutions. And a big congrats to Dropbox on its win for “Best Overall Startup”. The company’s young founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (seen below) demonstrated the power of the freemium model, and had the guts to turn down a 9 figure acquisition bid. Here are the nominees and winners: Best Technology Achievement Lytro  (Runner Up) NFC OnLive Siri   (Winner) Tesla Flat Pack Battery Best Social Application Facebook Timeline Instagram  (Runner Up) Google+   (Winner) The New New Twitter Path 2.0 Best Shopping Application Birchbox Fab    (Winner) Gilt Groupe Lot18 Warby Parker   (Runner Up) Best Mobile Application Evernote   (Winner) Flipboard   (Runner Up) Pandora Spotify Square TaskRabbit Best Location Application Airbnb Foursquare Grindr   (Winner) RunKeeper   (Runner Up) Uber Best Tablet Application djay Eventbrite At the Door Fotopedia   (Winner) GarageBand Netflix   (Runner Up) StumbleUpon Best Design Gojee Orchestra Path 2.0    (Winner) Pinterest   (Runner Up) Quora Best Bootstrapped Startup  (2010 winner: addmired) Github   (Runner Up) Imgur   (Winner) Instapaper Onesheet Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) Best Cloud Service Asana Box   (Runner Up) CloudFlare Dropbox   (Winner) Okta Twilio Best International Startup Badoo Klarna   (Runner Up) Peixe Urbano   (Winner) Rovio SoundCloud Wonga Best Clean Tech Startup Alta Energy Array Power   (Runner Up) EcoATM   (Winner) EcoMotors Hara Best New Device Galaxy Nexus iPad 2 iPhone 4S Kindle Fire   (Runner Up) Nest   (Winner) Best Time Sink Modern Warfare 3 Quora Skyrim   (Runner Up) Turntable.fm Words With Friends  (Winner) Biggest Social Impact Charity: Water   (Runner Up) Khan Academy Kickstarter Practice Fusion Twitter   (Winner) Angel of the Year Ron Conway Paul Graham Reid Hoffman   (Winner) Keith Rabois Naval Ravikant  and  Babak Nivi   (Runner Up) Kevin Rose VC of the Year Marc Andreessen  &  Ben Horowitz   (Winner) Matt Cohler   (Runner Up) Vinod Khosla Aileen Lee Yuri Milner David Sze Founder of the Year Leah Busque  (Task Rabbit) Brian Chesky  (Airbnb) Jack Dorsey  (Square, Twitter) (Winner) Susan Feldman  &  Ali Pincus  (One Kings Lane) Drew Houston  (Dropbox)  (Runner Up) CEO of the Year Dick Costolo  (Twitter) Daniel Ek  (Spotify)  (Runner Up) Phil Libin  (Evernote) Mark Pincus  (Zynga) Jeff Weiner  (LinkedIn) (Winner) Best New Startup of 2011 Codecademy   (Runner Up) Fab Nest Pinterest   (Winner) Turntable.fm Best Overall Startup of 2011 Dropbox   (Winner) Instagram Gilt Groupe Spotify Square   (Runner Up) Tumblr Thanks to everyone who watched, voted, or attended the Crunchies. This award show is about the tech community, and we’re honored to have you as our readers.

SoftKinetic And Intel P...

Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics. The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer. For example, as outlined over email by SoftKinetic’s vice president of marketing and communications Virgile Delporte, a young woman might walk up to SoftKinetic-equipped display at an airport, and she could browse information about nearby malls and fashion-related shops. If the viewer was an older man, they might see an ad for a nearby cigar shop. The description reminds me of one of the most famous scenes in Minority Report , when Tom Cruise’s character runs through the mall and all of the advertisements start delivering personalized messages. (The movie is also famous for featuring gesture-controlled computers, so clearly the SoftKinetic team was watching very closely) Of course, not everyone thinks the Minority Report future is positive, but for people worried about privacy, Delporte assures me that SoftKinetic’s data will be anonymized. “Only statistical information will be stored, and this anonymous data will be shared in the cloud to provide real-time data to the advertisers, who can easily test different advertising scenarios,” he says. “Think about the way web advertising is managed today. Combined with 3D imaging analysis, the data will get even more accurate.” SoftKinetic doesn’t have any customers to announce yet, but it’s demonstrating the technology at the Integrated Systems Europe conference in Europe starting January 31. I’ve included a video of SoftKinetic’s technology in action at Yahoo, as well as the Minority Report scene, below.

Let’s Get Personalized:...

Editor’s note: Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of Trapit , a personalized content discovery platform currently in beta. Trapit was incubated at SRI and the CALO project. eBay’s recent acquisition of the recommendation service Hunch was an important score for the online retailer, giving it a way to mine the ever-mounting mounds of structured and unstructured data for more relevant and accurate consumer recommendations. Such recommendation engines are already (and have long been) a necessity, not only for retailers, but for the entire Web. Every major internet company, from media outlets to social networks to software applications, is having to meet an expectation of better understanding their customers as individuals, to provide them with information and suggestions that they themselves may not even have realized they want or need. Integrating better recommendation algorithms and services was really just the first part of a larger, necessary movement to make the Web more personalized. As we watch the ongoing struggles of search engines to provide relevant yet deep-diving results, or Facebook’s fruitless attempts to better identify which content shared by your friends is most important for you to see, it’s clear that we need something smarter, something more sophisticated than mere recommendations and customization. Personalizing the Web is one of the most important and difficult engineering tasks we now face in the evolution of the Internet. Recommendations Have Hit the Ceiling Amazon and Netflix once stood as exemplars of recommendation, providing suggestions based on what other users with similar habits and product histories selected, with a touch of genetic genre data thrown in. Yet both have faltered in recommendation relevance as the crowd-sourced approach has become more of an echo chamber than a personalized filter. (And Amazon certainly does itself no favors with its barrage of “recommendations” for its own Kindle Fire). These recommendation engines were once ground-breaking, but they have failed to evolve. And more importantly, our expectations as Web consumers have evolved beyond the simple concepts of “users who purchased item X also purchased item Y.” At best, services that claim personalization based upon these aggregate metrics attempt to triangulate an identity for us as individuals based upon the galaxy of other individuals. They try to pin us down into an archetype, into a box of likes and interests, without recognizing that as humans, what we desire, want and need is in constant flux and ever-evolving. In all fairness, that’s an incredibly difficult awareness to achieve. But its disingenuous to attribute “personalization” to services that are really just crowd sourced general interest mapping. And those results are just insultingly banal! Getting Closer, All the Time The acquisition of Hunch will hopefully signal a shift from recommendations to actual personalization. This is not because Hunch is such a precise personalization tool, but rather because it is an excellent recommendation engine. As more relevant recommendations become ubiquitous as the standard across the Web, we can finally begin to aim to shoot beyond that baseline to realizing a personalized Web. Over the next few years, technology that truly understands and recognizes us as dynamic and unique individuals rather than types will be the predominate trend. Siri’s adaptability and cognizance is the first major step in this direction, and we will begin to see that type of finely-tuned, perpetually trained artificial intelligence helping turn the Web and our technology more and more towards us as individuals. It’s a movement from the Web mentality of searching, to one of delivery. It’s a shift from pull to push technology–and it’s happening because there is enormous upside for the first movers in the era of personalization. The shift to a more personalized Web is all about revenue and customer/user experience. Consider the shift that is still occurring with our televisions. Whereas we have long considered our television sets to be mere boxes for broadcasting pre determined content to us as passive consumers, we are increasingly taking control of that content. This extends beyond mere DVR capabilities, as Web-enabled televisions begin to offer a new layer of personalization. Our televisions will eventually become truly our own, unique televisions. Better yet, we will have accounts that we can log into that will personalize any television set with programming specifically selected by and for us. Groupon, no doubt, is itching to find ways to personalize each and every offer they have for each individual it is sent to. Groupon knows that targeting by regions increases conversion and sales, but imagine how much they could amplify that effect if they were targeting based on a rich and sophisticated understanding of the individual person that receives each offer? We can imagine this type of personalization applied to all of our current technologies, but it first requires a fundamental, philosophical shift in how we think about and understand the notion of personalization. A big part of that means that recommendation technology needs to be properly understood as the tip of the iceberg — it’s table stakes and nothing more. The real game is played with true personalization and a sophisticated understanding of individuals and all of their unique, ever-shifting personas. The Endless March of Personalization Progress At this stage, personalization is best achieved as a mashup of our interest graph, social graph, individual input, and Pandora-eque qualifications of structured data. When maximized, this can work quite well, but we can’t stop there. As the Web becomes our own personal web, the technology needs to register and understand our flux in personality. This means incorporating both more direct and more ambient information, such as awareness of time, location, my schedule, my habits and engagement with content. Furthermore, it means realizing that human identity is a constantly shifting target. The work of personalization is never done, even if it is done with less direct input and feedback from me personally. Content creators, marketers, sales professionals and publishers crave that myth of stability in defining their users and audience. Yet as the Web has shifted to become dominated by the stream metaphor, that myth has been easily eroded. This is not a bad thing, even if it makes understanding that customer baseline upon which we build businesses that much more difficult to determine. It was always a myth to begin with — we simply did not have the data or the tools to operate otherwise and recognize users as individuals, as the amalgam of ever-shifting interests and personalities that they truly are. What replaces that baseline of stability, however, is the flux of new opportunities, of understanding our customers and audience in increasingly focused and nuanced terms. Likewise, we as Web consumers are starting to expect this understanding from the websites and businesses with which we choose to interact. For companies, recommendation is the gateway into recognizing the value of a much more attuned personalization. And as recommendation layers become ubiquitous, we can now finally begin moving beyond it, to achieve personalization as the next great triumph of the Web.

iNdustrial Revolutions

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck , “iPads are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” It’s an ugly story . Over a hundred employees “injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis” because its use “meant workers could clean more screens each minute.” Other workers killed or injured by explosions. All so that iPads can be built as cheaply as possible, so that Apple can maintain its 44.7% gross margins. Isn’t that awful? Yes, of course — but let’s try to maintain a nuanced perspective here. This is hardly a new story, and it’s hardly unique to the tech industry. Think of the exploitation of child labor to harvest Egyptian cotton and Cote d’Ivoire cocoa . Plus ça change; a decade ago it was Indonesian sweatshops and Indian fireworks exciting outrage. Think of the exploitation of Congolese workers to mine coltan , used in electronics everywhere. Show me a country with a large population of desperately poor people, and I’ll show you horrific exploitation of impoverished workers. Please note, though, that the latter is an inevitable symptom of the former; and again, let’s please try to maintain a sense of perspective. It’s awful that a dozen Chinese workers were killed and hundreds injured building iPads–but at the same time, coal mining kills more than two thousand Chinese workers a year (down from almost 7000 ten years ago) and nobody’s suddenly outraged about them . We in the West don’t really seem to care that Chinese employees work under awful conditions and die in appalling numbers — unless they make shiny things that we use. We claim we don’t want people to suffer, but in fact we just don’t want our iProducts tainted by that suffering. Isn’t that more than a little hypocritical? So what? you might say. It’s all horrible! Stop them all, or any of it that we can stop, right now! Right? No. Not necessarily. This is a really complex and difficult issue, and there’s no obvious right answer. Over the last thirty years, trade and export-driven growth have been insanely great for China, and made life enormously better for the overwhelming majority of its billion-plus people. (My personal experience bears out all the data, for what it’s worth: in 1997 I spent a month roaming solo through central China, then came back nine years later. China 1997 and China 2006 were like two entirely different nations, and the latter was vastly better off.) If Apple and other Western manufacturers were to pull production from China to other, better-paid, union-friendlier jurisdictions with stronger protections for worker rights, that would be disastrous for Apple’s profit margins and innovation speed — but it would also be disastrous for China’s people. On the whole, overall, despite the gruesome and heartrending disasters in the spotlight right now, both sides benefit greatly. That’s how and why free trade works. At the same time, we can all agree that no businesses anywhere should be poisoning their workers and/or generally treating human lives like disposable Kleenex. This is especially true in a nation whose government only accepts trade unions which are powerless government puppets . But I would argue that it’s China’s steadily growing wealth — which comes from trade, and especially, manufacturing — that will ultimately transform it into a nation where real unions and real worker rights can and do exist. It’s worth noting that Foxconn’s problems are China’s national problems writ small. Hexane pollution and aluminum dust are scale-model versions of the nationwide poisoned milk scandal, or the ongoing catastrophe of Beijing’s hyper-polluted air , or the major lakes entirely conquered by toxic cyanobacteria. Again, employee exploitation is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is ubiquitous grinding poverty – something that trade, investment, and economic growth slowly, over decades, alleviates, albeit at a terrifying cost to the environment. Think of the West’s Industrial Revolution. That’s more or less the same revolution transforming China right now. Is it possible to have such a revolution without some concomitant Dickensian horrors? The available evidence sadly indicates “probably not.” In the interim, what Apple (and the countless less-sexy enterprises whose products are manufactured in China under similar conditions) can do to improve the lot of those who craft its wares is this: increase their leverage over their suppliers, by making the threat of moving production elsewhere credible. Foxconn wants to keep Apple happy, obviously – but they’d be a lot more proactive about doing so if they genuinely thought they might lose massive amounts of Apple’s business to someone else. A concrete example: Apple shouldn’t get Foxconn to manufacture iPads in Brazil : they should have another company entirely build iPads in Brazil. Right now Apple needs Foxconn almost as much as Foxconn needs Apple. Real competition among suppliers would mean that each of them will jump a lot higher and faster when Apple says “worker rights.” But let’s not get myopic about Apple and iPads, when the landscape of globalization and its excesses is so much vaster and more diverse. Let’s not pretend that the dynamic is purely “rich Western tech companies exploiting poor nations.” And let’s remember that technology, and China’s growing wealth, will probably ultimately solve this problem. Remember that decade-old outrage about child labor in India’s fireworks industry? Well, it’s much diminished these days, thanks to automation and India’s much wealthier society . Similarly, China’s burgeoning online population has pressured its government to pay attention to air pollution … and Foxconn is already roboticizing its assembly lines . Most of all, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the technology pioneered in large part by the very same cohort of Western companies who outsource production to China is, slowly but steadily , lifting China, India and sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. That, not where your iPad came from, is the most important story in the world today. Image : Smog over Tiananmen Square in 2006, by yours truly. By all accounts it’s gotten much worse since.

Android May Have Consum...

According to a new report from managed enterprise mobility provider Good Technology , iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) hold the top three spots in the list of the top 10 enterprise activations by device type. The report includes data gathered by Good for Q4 2011 and includes half of the Fortune 100, providing insight into enterprise activation trends among some of the world’s biggest businesses. The company found that despite Android’s overall market share growth and steady absolute growth among Good’s customers, only 35% of all smartphone activations were on Android, compared with iPhone’s 65%. The mid-October release of the iPhone 4S helped that particular device quickly earn the number one position on the top 10 enterprise activations list, with the iPhone 4 moving into spot #2. The iPad 2, meanwhile, claimed the third position. Since there are far more Android devices than iPhone models, it’s not as fair to compare trends on a device-by-device basis. After all, there’s aren’t just a couple models of Android phones out there – there are dozens upon dozens of “top” (popular) devices. However, even when looked at as a whole, Android activations accounted for just 35% of the smartphone activations and only 6% of tablet activations. The Samsung Galaxy S II was the top Android device at spot #6 and was followed by the Motorola Droid Bionic, the Motorola Droid 3, Sprint EVO 4G (Q3′s most popular Android device) and the Motorola Droid X2. Motorola phones were popular over the course of the past year, too, and were represented in the top 10 each quarter. Good does note that iPhone activations had slowed in the previous quarter, in anticipation of the new iPhone, then jumped significantly after its launch, with 31% of smartphone activations from that device alone. But collectively, iOS devices accounted for over 70% of all activations in Q4, an indication that enterprise customers’ iOS preference wasn’t just being boosted by the iPhone 4S launch. iOS is the preferred choice in the enterprise, Good says. On the tablet front, iOS’s domination is even more apparent – the iPad and iPad 2 account for 94% of the total tablet activations in Q4, compared with 6% for Android tablets, where the Galaxy Tab leads the pack. iPads were most popular in three industries: financial services (accounting for 42% for the quarter), business/professional services and life sciences. Going into Q1 and Q2, Good says that it expects iPad and iPad 2 activations to slow heading into March, as customers prepare for the (rumored) launch of the iPad 3. It also expects Android activations to increase on a relative basis after the immediate impact of the iPhone 4S lessens and as BYOD (bring your own device) programs become more common. However, says John Herrema, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Good, the company expects the iOS/Android numbers to be roughly the same during the first half of 2012 as they are now. A change would require a major shift in tablet trends. “I don’t see that happening with the iPad 3 on the horizon,” says Herrema. “If Android and iOS split smartphone [market share] or even if Android takes the overall smartphone lead, it would still likely be no more than 40% of all Good activations overall, given the dominance of Apple on tablets and the large numbers of tablets we are activating. Meanwhile, I don’t see Android dropping substantially below where it is now because that would require major shift among BYOD smartphone users.” We should note that this report does not look at RIM devices or Windows Phone, as Good doesn’t have insight into these platforms. This is only a comparison between the iOS/Android adoption rates in the enterprise, which by itself, limits itself to enterprise environments where BlackBerry has already fallen from favor.